Birding Without Borders

by Noah Strycker

  “Do you go to church?” I asked. “It looks like the faith is strong here.”

  “Of course!” he said. “Most of my family are born-again Christians, but some of them keep the old ways. I myself believe in voodoo and magic.”

  “Really?” I asked, intrigued. “Like what?”

  “I have seen things,” Kalu said. “For instance, one time I saw an empty boat on the earth with a man standing next to it, making paddling motions with his hands. The boat moved on its own—that was magic.”

  He went on to explain that, living in Accra, he had to attend church so people wouldn’t think he was too weird for being a birder.

  “I just don’t like hearing about hell and everything all the time,” he said. “I want to die quietly one day and rest in peace. So, as a compromise, I joined a Mormon church and have been going there every Sunday for years.”

  “Is that much different than other churches?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Kalu said. “The Mormons don’t have dancing, partying, and endless sermons—a man just tells us calm things each week. By the end of the service, I am so relaxed! They don’t yell in my face, or force me to give money.”

  His friends, he added, often asked about these services; they would see people go in but couldn’t hear any drums or singing.

  “People wonder what happens inside, because it doesn’t seem much like church to them,” he said.

  Kalu asked politely if I was religious.

  “I don’t go to church, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “But I believe in the power of nature. Everything is connected, and we are all part of a larger whole. For me, I guess watching birds is as much a religious experience as listening to a preacher. Birds can teach us a lot about the world and our place in it.”

  “Amen,” Kalu said.

  A minute later, just beyond the Blood of Jesus Sewing Center and the End Time Cold Store, I saw a strange vision: a full-grown man stood tall on the roadside, facing traffic, without a stitch of clothing. The naked man stared at us, his eyes widening when we passed.

  “Whoa, did you see that?” I exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Kalu said. “That was a madman.”

  Then he flashed a mischievous smile.

  “In Ghana,” he said, “we have a saying that might as well apply to birders: not all madmen are naked!”

  12

  The Karamoja Apalis

  IN BIRDWATCHING, size doesn’t really matter. That is, the length of a life list does not necessarily measure the caliber of its author. In fact, the opposite is often true: you can build a big list by seeking new birds instead of observing the same birds repeatedly—as many of the world’s top listers do—but the result is that you’ll have only a passing understanding of what you have seen, in the same way that someone who spends an hour at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City watches a lot of planes but can’t possibly grasp all the nuances of the city’s culture. It takes time to get to know birds, and time is a luxury that often goes by the wayside in the listing game.

  Expertise comes from focusing on a single region or taxonomic group, or even just one species. There is no such thing as “the greatest birder in the world”—and even if such a determination could be made, it probably wouldn’t be the guy with the most notches on his binocs, me included.

  Here’s an example. A couple of years ago, I took part in an organized group tour of Ecuador for a few days. The trip was led by one of the country’s most experienced guides, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the 1,700 species found there. Several of the tour’s participants had recorded many more birds than that—one man had a life list approaching 8,000—but when I asked them about certain species, they couldn’t remember them without checking a spreadsheet. The guide pointed out every single bird. He set up a spotting scope and people lined up to peer through it, hardly bothering to try spotting birds on their own. The best birder in this group wasn’t one of the high listers; it was the guide, who had spent a lifetime studying the birds of one country.

  So what does a list measure, if not expertise or talent? Some argue that a list is only a metric of the depth of one’s pockets and the free time to empty them. Those critics have a point, but I think a list is grander than that: besides reflecting how many places a person has traveled, it measures the desire to see those places and those birds firsthand. A list, in other words, is a personal account of dreams and memories. It conveys poetry and passion and inspiration.

  ✧-✧-✧

  My year list was growing by leaps and bounds, but in Africa I started to lose my grip. Everywhere else, I’d had at least a basic knowledge of the birds in each region, but here, on the one continent I’d never touched before, everything was brand-new. I traveled too fast to prepare thoroughly, which meant that I was forced to learn the birds as I went. My capacity for absorbing names and field marks was stretched to the limit.

  With Kalu’s guidance, I encountered a total of 318 bird species in just over a week in Ghana, 295 of which I’d never seen before in my life. Learning the bird names became an all-consuming task. I mixed up my cisticolas; I confused my camaropteras and eremomelas; I puzzled over the Copper-tailed Starling and Bronze-tailed Starling.

  Typically, for long-distance birding trips, I study for months in advance. To know what to expect, there is no substitute for homework—poring through field guides, listening to tapes, reading trip reports, printing out checklists, and researching locations. Then, when I land in a new place, I have a map in my head of what I’m looking for, ready for the treasure hunt.

  Now, though, I struggled to keep up. Studying the birds of one country is different than taking on the whole planet. It wasn’t possible to know every bird ahead of time, so I did my best to figure out the African species along the way. By the time I left the continent two months later, I’d have a pretty good handle on its bird life, but the first forays were overwhelming.

  My strategy of connecting with locals really paid off in unfamiliar surroundings. In Africa I depended heavily on the expertise of my hosts. Some were full-time guides, others had day jobs, still others were students, and a few were retired, but they all had one thing in common: they lived there, and they were willing to share with me their sheer love of birds. This network of birders literally meant the world to me. Without it, I would have found fewer species, made fewer friends, learned less about each place, and had a lot less fun.

  The purist, hoping to level birding’s playing field, might suggest that guides shouldn’t be allowed on listing endeavors at all—that any bird first spotted by someone else shouldn’t count. As appealing as it sounds, the logic of this idea quickly breaks down, and not just because it ignores the camaraderie that is such a huge part of the enjoyment of birdwatching. I once thought that a “self-found” Big Year would be a noble enterprise, but gradually realized that imposing this limitation would be a recipe for ignorance and loneliness of planetary proportions. Refusing to use guides is like starting a business without an accountant, or writing a book without an editor: it suggests that you’d rather be incompetent than learn from others.

  Still, I generally avoided group tours of the sort I once experienced in Ecuador. It would have been easy enough—though way beyond the modest book advance that was financing this trip—to contact one or two international bird-tour businesses and have them arrange everything. Several excellent companies advertise birding trips on all seven continents, with stables of expert leaders, efficient office staff, and knowledgeable ground agents. They are happy to craft bespoke itineraries, and some will even rustle up tourmates if you don’t have a vanful of friends.

  But my Big Year wouldn’t work with the usual birding-tour strategy. For one thing, I had specific and sometimes unusual targets in each destination, skipping the birds I’d already seen. I had to move fast—on average, twice as quickly as organized tours do. Though it sounds strange, I also had to miss a lot of birds, an approach that champion birder Stuart Keith once aptly called “w
orldwide cream-skimming.” Finally, for the kind of journey I envisioned, it just didn’t seem appropriate to use big companies. I wanted one-on-one time with local characters and visionaries in far-flung places, and I was willing to sacrifice a few species for the sake of that. I knew I couldn’t live like a local while surrounded by other foreigners on pre-packaged tours, so I made a rule from the start: all of my guides had to live in the country where I joined them.

  The grassroots strategy worked better than I had dared hope, and I stuck to it through virtually the entire year. I scheduled only two group tours, in South Africa and Tanzania, to save money: in both cases, companions would dramatically reduce the cost of exploring the big national parks, which were geared toward groups on safari. I’d still have local guides but would be joined by other birders on each leg—several independent travelers in South Africa and a group of American friends in Tanzania—for a more formal tour experience. In these places, for the first time this year, I’d be part of a lister crowd. I just hoped they could keep pace.

  ✧-✧-✧

  My mid-July arrival in South Africa came at 1 A.M. on a redeye from Cameroon to Johannesburg. Throughout seventeen days in the West African wet season, in a wide river of humanity, I’d seen exactly two other white people—a pair of missionaries in a remote village in Ghana—and it felt strange to be surrounded by white faces. Was this reverse culture shock? I’d gotten so used to being a minority that I only noticed when I no longer stuck out.

  The past nine days in Cameroon had been an intense journey into the heart of darkness. I’d seen some amazing birds, including an odd species called a Gray-necked Rockfowl, which attaches its mud nest to the vertical walls of rainforest caves. And I’d witnessed wonderful places, from the coast to the misty slopes of Mount Cameroon, the tallest mountain in West Africa. But conditions in Cameroon were challenging and dispiriting. When I arrived, the man I’d contacted, Benji—the only local birder I could find in all of Cameroon—told me he’d spent the expense money I wired ahead without making any reservations for us, and he asked for a loan to cover our trip, which he never paid back. A large man without front teeth, Benji said between cigarettes that tourism had crashed in Cameroon after Boko Haram guerrillas invaded the northern part of the country, and that he was surviving by selling knickknacks at a botanical garden in Douala. I felt sorry for him, but also chagrined that he’d applied my entire Cameroon budget to his personal debts.

  The roads, muddy from monsoon rains, were a nightmare. We had breakdowns, delays, detours, more breakdowns, and more delays. I slept in buildings that in other countries would have been condemned; most had no other guests. For the better part of nine days we got along with no electricity, running water, or toilet paper while eating everything—mostly rice and goat meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—with our hands. Washing clothes was out of the question, so the whole time I wore the same mud-and-sweat-soaked shirt and pants, which in the heavy humidity never dried out. Birding in Cameroon is hard enough without trying to do it on a shoestring during the wet season, and it was heartbreaking to know that despite all our efforts I missed a lot of birds. I left Douala while heavy rains flooded the city; my last memory is of an outdoor market where sellers and customers sloshed around in three feet of water and mud. Four months later, in October, hundreds of U.S. troops deployed to north Cameroon to help fight the guerrillas in what would become a long and indeterminate occupation.

  I caught a little sleep on the floor of the Johannesburg airport before Wayne Jones, the leader of my South African tour, appeared in crisp attire and a clean white van to pick me up at 6 A.M. The other five participants had arrived the previous day and were waking up at a nearby hotel. Appraising my ragged appearance, Wayne said, “Let’s get you to the hotel to freshen up—you can grab a quick shower there before we head out.”

  “Is there hot running water?” I asked.

  “Of course—it’s a hotel!” Wayne said.

  For once, I was glad to be on an organized tour. The constant struggle of Cameroon had worn me down, and I needed a mental break. For this South African stretch, I wouldn’t have to worry about anything except finding birds. The tour had been organized by Rockjumper, the world’s biggest birding tour operator (by set departures), which is headquartered in Johannesburg. I couldn’t wait to relax a little and hang out with a convivial group of birders. Soaping up in the gloriously steamy shower, I wondered who they might be.

  Wayne, tall and slender with short hair and a craggy smile, lived in Johannesburg and worked full-time leading tours for Rockjumper. After this tour he’d be headed straight to Namibia, rotating with other assignments in places like Ethiopia, Kenya, and India. We were now in his home territory: eastern South Africa, home of Kruger National Park and all its natural wonders.

  As Wayne drove the van, I gradually got to know the rest of the group: Martha Miller (a curriculum specialist) and Janine Gregory (an economist) from Canada; Brian Rapoza (an environmental teacher) and Alan Mitchnick (a biologist) from the United States; and Klas Magnus Karlsson, a quirky high school physics teacher from Sweden and my roommate for the week. Janine had been talked into the trip by Martha on the strength of cute safari animals, but the rest of us were serious birders.

  We were all excited for what the next few days would bring. Kruger National Park, on the border with Mozambique and Zimbabwe, is the size of Israel. More than five hundred species of birds have been recorded within its borders, but the park is famed for hosting the “big five,” supposedly the most difficult African animals to hunt—the lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, and rhinoceros—along with other safari creatures: cheetah, zebra, giraffe, wildebeest, hippo, hyena, impala, rhebok, steenbok, blesbok, eland, kudu, hartebeest, suni, topi, oribi, duiker, nyala, sitatunga, klipspringer. This is South Africa’s flagship reserve, visited by more than a million tourists a year, outfitted with two dozen safari lodges and hundreds of park rangers. At night everyone must stay within designated camps surrounded by high fences—if you’re not back by 5:30 P.M., you’ll pay a stiff fine—and then the park becomes a reverse zoo, with free-roaming animals surrounding the locked-up humans.

  And birds! Some, like the Southern Ground-Hornbill and Kori Bustard, are as big and charismatic as the furry animals. Birds of the African savanna are relatively easy to see; if South America, with its thousands of species, is known as “the bird continent,” then Africa is “the bird watching continent” for its raw spectacle. On safari, you don’t have to spend hours stalking cryptic species through slimy jungles, because the birds sit in plain view.

  Kruger’s park rules forbid people to exit their vehicles lest a predator suddenly leap from the bushes, so everyone drives slowly around a network of one-lane roads, circling like the White-backed Vultures that soar overhead. As Wayne piloted our van into the park, we leapfrogged between traffic jams with good results: at one group of cars, a pride of lions emerged from the bush within spitting distance, and at another pile-up a zebra carcass seethed in scavenging hyenas and jackals. A passerby rolled down his window to direct us to a nearby group of white rhinos. Later, joining three other cars at a wide pullout, we watched two leopards lounging in the grass, barely visible on a hidden sandbank.

  Each time we stopped, other vehicles appeared behind our van’s bumper, their occupants straining to see what we’d spotted. It was like pointing at the sky on a crowded street—pretty soon everyone is looking up. As soon as Wayne hit the brakes five cars would stack up behind us, hoping we’d spotted a big cat. When they realized it was just a dove, or a kingfisher, most people drove off, embarrassed or annoyed, as if they’d been duped. Eventually, we hit on a solution that worked pretty well: whenever anyone got close, one of us rolled down the window and flashed a copy of Birds of South Africa. We called this ploy “flipping them the bird.”

  Never mind the big animals, the birding was fantastic. Flocks tumbled through the bushveld, and whenever our group came across one of these concentrations chaos erupted inside
the van.

  “Green-winged Pytilia!” shouted Wayne, stopping abruptly on a desolate stretch of dirt road. “Look for the little red-and-green bird on the ground, just underneath the shrubs on the left.”

  “I see a Chinspot Batis, too!” Alan added.

  “Oh, what’s that bird next to the batis?” exclaimed Martha. “It’s bright orange-yellow underneath!”

  “Sulphur-breasted Bushshrike,” Wayne said. “Does everybody see it?”

  I found myself wondering how I could get more excited about a Cape Crombec—a beige-gray bird less than five inches long—than a whole herd of zebras, and remembered something Kalu had said in Ghana: “We wouldn’t have seen the elephants if we weren’t looking for birds.” His words resonated more deeply the more I considered them.

  My year list was helping me appreciate our Earth at different scales. Sometimes it’s easier to absorb a large canvas, like Kruger, by examining it one small detail at a time—the difference between breezing through an art exhibit and stopping to ponder each piece. I felt more intimately connected to this landscape through the intricate plumage of a Miombo Wren-Warbler than the sight of a thousand wildebeest, because the wren-warbler required closer attention. This pursuit of birds, with prolonged focus and effort, was like a portal to the world, from the tiniest detail to the biggest panorama.

  In a park full of tourists on safari, I was glad to be in a group of birders. All day we discussed nothing but our shared obsession. Nobody called us idiosyncratic for traveling halfway around the world, to one of the most spectacular big-game wildlife extravaganzas, to stare at diminutive petronias and tit-flycatchers. Cocooned inside the van with Wayne at the wheel and a nonstop stream of birds outside, we were fully immersed. If a flow state is bliss, then in this company I experienced pure contentment.